The Power of Real-Time Behavioral Data in the Video-on-Demand Era

Blog, ProdegeMR - February 14th, 2019

If you attended Quirk’s London this week, you may have caught the presentation by Adam Portner of ProdegeMR and Chris Havemann from RealityMine on “The Power of Real-Time Behavioral Data in the Video-on-Demand Era.”

Adam and Chris showed the audience how survey data in combination with behavioral data can help researchers understand how and why people consumed video content during the recent holiday season. The findings come from a study where we leveraged ProdegeMR’s engaged online panel of over 60 million registered members plus RealityMine’s ability to passively collect the behavioral data of people who install the company’s innovative RealityMeter to their mobile device.

In our analysis we found that, not surprisingly, use of YouTube was ubiquitous — 9 in 10 of our respondents watched YouTube content on their phones, with over 50% of them watching YouTube content multiple times per day. Consumption of SVOD (Netflix, Hulu and the like) is more limited. Netflix is by far the most popular SVOD service and nearly a quarter of those who subscribe to Netflix viewed Netflix content on their phones, though only once every 2-3 days on average, not multiple times per day.

From our survey, respondents told us that they watch content YouTube as a form of ‘escapism’. Two-thirds of YouTube viewers told us they watched because they needed some ‘alone time’ and just over half said they watched because they needed ‘a break from holiday planning or celebrations’. Netflix viewers were much less likely to cite those same reasons, instead they said they watched Netflix content on their phones simply to catch up on shows and movies.

The meter not only enabled us to record video consumption, but also whether or not our respondents visited 3 retailer websites (Amazon, Target and Walmart). We found that those viewing Netflix content on their mobile devices were much more likely to visit these websites during the holiday season, with a large portion of them visiting more than one of those sites.

So what can we take away from this?

Netflix is by far the leading choice when it comes to SVOD, however paid content is not consumed at nearly the same volume as free content on YouTube. That being said, the prevalence and frequency of consumers using their phone to watch video from SVOD services should be expected to increase as more people watch “on-the-go” to keep up with shows, and continue watching movies they may have started on another device. This is a trend SVOD providers should encourage as our research shows that those who watch video content on their phones are more likely to be shoppers.

The research world has followed consumers onto the internet, onto mobile, and now onto a world of fragmented media. We now need to follow consumers as they adapt to an even more complex and technologically advanced world, and the combination of behavioral data and attitudinal data is a powerful approach to help us do that.